Chile Indians Block Dam Project

Staff PlanetArk

| August 8, 2003

A group of elderly Pehuenche Indian women are refusing to sell
their land at Ralco in Southern Chile, frustrating the national
electric utility's plans to build a $570 million hydroelectric dam,
reports PlanetArk. 'For six years the women have rejected
offers of money -- up to $1.1 million -- and land in exchange for
their 103 acres on the banks of the Bio Bio River that Chile's
Endesa power company needs to finish its giant power station
project.' The Pehuenches, a tribe of the Mapuche people, Chile's
largest indigenous group, are standing firm, backed up by a 1993
law that granted them control of their traditional lands in
perpetuity. 'They're not going to flood my land,' said one of the
women, 78-year-old Berta Quintreman, 'I'll only leave here when I'm
dead.'
-- Leif Utne